"Why not? What good could there possibly be in—?" He can't seem to find an end to the sentence; he shakes his head instead.

"True strength," he says, after thoughtfully sipping his tea, "is not merely a question of destroying everyone who challenges you. It is a question of remaining true to yourself and your own values, even under circumstances where a lesser man might not."

"...you say that like it makes what I did last night not weakness."

"I cannot tell you which of your values should be most important to you. But I don't think that the ability to walk away from reckless children without harming them is a weakness."

He stares angrily at his half-finished breakfast.

"I shouldn't—feel like this," he says, more to himself than his uncle. "I shouldn't—"

He shakes his head, jumps to his feet, and abandons his food to go practice firebending some more.

He sighs. He decides to finish his breakfast rather than leaving it to follow his nephew.

Karen has had no breakfast. Or dinner. Or discussions with helpful mentor types. 

Her stomach rumbles. 

"I wish I knew how to spearfish," she says, idly. "I wish I knew how to make spears. Or bows. Or traps. I bet bows and traps are harder. Maybe if we just got, like, a decent branch, and whittled the end into a point, and rammed it into the fish really hard?"

Whine.

"M'sorry, boy." 

A while later she has a makeshift wooden spear, has managed to make herself even hungrier by trying to stab things, and has zero fish.

A breeze with a hint of a sparkle in it swirls down the river, skimming over the water, and leaps up to spin in little circles in front of Karen.

"There's a town up ahead but it's kind of far away, I'm not sure you can get there before dark. I didn't find any closer ones except the one you came from."

"Well, that's something. I wish we could go back, it'd mean a lot to Fen, but I don't know what Mr. Fire Punches is gonna do and I really don't wanna get the village in trouble for harboring fugitives. Does the forest end at any point between here and the other village? I can travel way faster over grassland."

"Um - there's more forest and then less forest and then more forest again. But not no forest."

She scoops up her dog and tries to ignore the gnawing in her stomach. 

"Well. We'll travel as fast as we can manage. I think I've scared off all the fish around here anyway. If it looks like we're not gonna reach it by dusk, we can try fishing again, I guess."

She is so so so so mad at herself for not focusing more on survival skills that she could not reasonably have ever expected herself to need in this quantity. But she heads out.

The spirit settles invisibly back into place.

She travels as fast as she can manage. She's somewhat slower when she's hungry and miserable. They're not at anything village-like by dusk, so she puts a plastic baggy from her pocket over a leaf in the hope that it'll release water (stupid stupid stupid, should have bought a metal container off of Fen when she had the chance, now she doesn't have anything safe to boil water in, stupid), and settles down to try spearfishing again for as long as she has light.

She catches one fish. It's not very big. She cooks it and gives half of it to Wishbone and is still really hungry afterwards.

Around dusk, a steamship comes upriver.

Lovely. She puts her fire out with handfuls of dirt and hides in the forest, covered and low to the ground but close enough to see the ship as it passes her.

Same ship?

Same ship. Same prince, standing at the railing, gazing moodily out into the forest. He doesn't appear to spot her.

She hates this whole stupid dimension. (Not really. Fen and Glimmer are in this dimension and Fen and Glimmer are fine. Well, Glimmer's probably fine, anyway.)

He's probably headed for the same town we are.

I guess so, the spirit agrees. Are you still going to go there?

Think I gotta, I'm not remotely confident that I can catch enough fish to stay alive out here. How big was the village, is it gonna be possible for both of us to be there at the same time without directly running into each other?

I guess? it says doubtfully. I think there's room for that but I don't really know how easy it is for humans to avoid each other if they want to.

Sigh. I guess we'll just have to risk it. We've gotta be running a serious calorie deficit at this point.

She lets the steamship pass and, once again, sleeps in a tree. At dawn she takes a few more stabs at spearfishing, fails again, and decides to go ahead and try to make it to the town.

The town is, as promised, bigger than the last one, enough so that she and the prince could avoid each other if they were both trying pretty hard.

He's not trying very hard at all, though. He's standing by one end of the town's small but extant market, glowering at the middle distance while his soldiers buy food.

(The scar is much more obvious with his helmet off. It looks... bad. Bad enough that you might reasonably wonder if he still even has sight in that eye.)